


Snapshots

by longnoideatime



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M, Romance, Vignettes
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-21
Updated: 2019-04-21
Packaged: 2020-01-23 13:51:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,423
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18551083
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/longnoideatime/pseuds/longnoideatime
Summary: Snapshots of Hermione and Draco throughout their school careers as they grow closer. M to be safe.





	Snapshots

He noticed her in their first year, when she was stood alone after being a right swot to Potter and Weaselby. He watched her square her shoulders as everyone streamed around her before lifting her chin and continuing on her way to her next class as if everyone snickering along with the golden two had no effect on her. He understood her, in that moment, not always exactly _charming_ himself, though he had the money and looks to make up for it. Her pride, her brilliance, her ability to speak truth to Potter; he might not have necessarily liked them or her, but he felt something akin to respect as he watched her in that moment. 

She first saw him on the train to Hogwarts, going from compartment to compartment to ask after Neville’s toad. He was alone in the hallway, purchasing snacks from the cart, and scoffed when she asked him if he’d seen it. 

“You’re wasting your time, y’know?” he’d said, and if his tone had been somewhat cold, he’d still eyed her with an air of vague interest. “He lost the thing on the train platform too.”

She sighed in exasperation and leaned against the wall, pushing her bushy hair behind one ear; it seemed constantly to burst forth from any containment. 

He’d just been a pale boy with silvery blonde hair and pointed features then, and she remembered looking up at him, surprised at the kindness when he slid a pumpkin pastry across the cart to her as he collected the rest of his purchases. 

“You’re new—“ he’d started to say before Pansy Parkinson strode down the train, her expression twisted in disgust as it settled on Hermione. 

“Draco!” she’d said. “Do you need help? I wouldn’t want you to have to share too much air with this common _filth_.”

He’d looked back at her, a new light of understanding in his clear grey eyes, and said nothing as he let the girl lead him away. She’d crushed his pastry beneath her heel before storming off down the train, doggedly asking after the stupid toad. 

It had started in their third year, when she’d punched him. No one else would have done that. After that he tried to stop the word “mudblood” from crossing his lips. It hadn’t meant anything to him before then, whatever his opinion of her. After that he wanted to know her, for her to see that he did. After that he caught himself staring at her too often, his eyes used to having their agency, but her he couldn’t be seen to stare at. Not the way he was.

He was afraid she’d noticed it in their fourth year, during the Yule ball. He couldn’t have been the only one transfixed by her, probably just another face disappearing into a sea of admirers, but for a moment he felt like she saw him, suspicious as she might not have been with someone else’s attention on her, but he couldn’t look anywhere else until Goyle clapped him too hard on the shoulder, breaking his stare.

Malfoy stared at her as she walked down the stairs in her Yule dress, and while usually she would have expected a sneer, or him clearly making some sort of joke at her expense amongst the Slytherins — she’d gotten so practiced with these she could feel them now across the space of the Great Hall — his face was neutral and intent. He was a closed off sort of git for all his loud, obnoxious bragging. 

It had started when they were in their fifth year, and he’d had her dead to rights. Things had already gone south, to have a second strike against her after the DA with Umbridge lording over the school— They’d been stood closer than they usually were, frozen in the moment of his discovery of her malfeasance in a darkened corridor lit mostly by the moon glowing brightly through the windows, and she felt his presence as if he was looming over her like some giant carrion crow, knife-blade lean in his great black robes and much taller than her than he’d once been, or perhaps it simply felt that way in the moment. It was only when his fingers closed cautiously around hers that she realised how tightly she was holding her wand, her grip relaxing fractionally beneath his touch, her eyes wary. His thumb brushed over the raised scabs of Umbridge’s last punishment.

“Granger,” he’d said, his dark eyes like depthless reflecting pools. “Go back to your common room.”

His hand slid from hers, but the coolness of his skin lingered as he turned and disappeared back into the halls.

It grew the night of The Battle of The Department of Mysteries. She came back to Hogwarts, and for her it wasn’t like it was with Harry: her home with her parents was actually home. Hogwarts was many things, most wonderful, but not home. That was where she wanted to run to after a night of risking her life, but as the years went by she was by necessity more and more separate, unable to tell her parents the danger she knowingly put herself in. What parents would let their fifteen year old child come back to a school that yearly threatened to kill her? She didn’t have patience for Malfoy and his ilk; she’d had even less of it with him since he’d begun to confuse her. Every time she saw him now she was angry that she didn’t know what to think, and she was so _empty_  when they came back that night. 

She was battered, but her eyes were lit with a fire that threatened to burn over into something more fearsome as they stared at each other — Well, she was glaring really. He resisted the knowing looks and teasing elbows his friends were giving him, waiting for him to pounce on the clear opportunity to take advantage of her weakness, just staring at her. He’d had her pressed into him hours earlier, his wand at her neck in Umbridge’s office. If he’d held her like he was conscious of her, like he was afraid of breaking her thin limbs with his unclean hands, what could be proven now?

Her chin lifted imperiously. “I hope your father enjoys Azkaban, Malfoy,” she spat angrily. 

“What?” he said, stepping forward, and there was something in his countenance that hadn’t been there in the instant before, eyes hard and focused. Hermione almost swallowed at the change. “What did you say?”

“Didn’t you know?” she asked challengingly, wondering why it felt like she had to gather her anger around herself like a shield now, when surely he’d known. He was culpable. He was foul, bigoted and loathsome. Even if he hadn’t known. “They arrested him tonight.”

“Potter,” he said to himself, his fists clenching. She didn’t know why she felt like she was looking at a stranger to see him so angry; surely she’d seen him such many times before. Casting back in her memory produced no results except the night he’d held her hand coolly within his own, the way he’d looked at her. He whirled, feet speeding faster and faster away from her, towards the dungeons. She’d forgotten that he had a mother he’d want to call; she was left empty in the halls, arms limp at her sides, her anger unfocused and without a target, dissipating in her veins. 

She found him after the DA’s hexes had been put right, on her way to the library for a final trip returning the books she’d borrowed, his head in his hands as he sat crouched on the balls of his feet outside the infirmary. She stopped, hesitating. It would’ve been so much easier to pass him and his troubles by. Her quiet footsteps made him start as she approached, face turning mocking and defensive when he saw it was her, like the red rimming his eyes was more of a vulnerability beneath her stare than the others’. He opened his mouth, doubtless to say something horrible and cruel. 

“I’m sorry about your father,” she said, surprising them both. 

He relaxed fractionally, sagging slightly into the wall as his face resumed its usual arrogant, expressionless baseline, head turned away from her as he pretended to look down the hall. “You shouldn’t be,” he said. It was surreal to have actually chosen to speak to Malfoy; Hermione felt almost like she was in a dream. He looked back at her, eyes piercing. His lips quirked slightly at how uncomfortable that look made her. “You should be celebrating.”

“I’m sorry for _you_ ,” she clarified, before realising that was almost stranger. 

He smiled mirthlessly again and looked away from her. “You shouldn’t be.”

She set her books down and settled next to him on the floor, on the opposite side of where he looked past his shoulder down the hall; she didn’t particularly want to meet his eyes either. Not looking made it easier to pretend this wasn’t real. “What are you going to do?” she asked. 

His hands were clenched so tightly the knuckles had turned white, his veins risen from beneath his skin. “What I have to.”

She touched him back, cautiously, trying to make less of his hand on her hand in a darkened hall, to understand it in its repetition, her fingers smoothing over the backs of his. “We would— You know Dumbledore would help you,” she said, her voice a whisper that felt choked in her throat, so quiet she could barely hear it herself. 

Their shoulders were touching as he turned those fathomlessly dark eyes back to her, searching as if there was something hidden to be found in her face. “What about you?” he asked. Her heart was beginning to beat quicker in her chest, nerves making her chest tight. “Would you help us?”

“Me?” she echoed, and he could see her breath coming quicker, her chest rising and falling faster than sitting required. It wasn’t sex from her, what he wanted — he’d always thought of it as a mechanical function before, but when he’d considered sex with her late one night, he’d felt somehow it would have left him too open and vulnerable beneath her clear-eyed gaze — but his eyes were drawn down her neck to the swath of skin left bare by her modest t-shirt despite himself. 

“Would you help me?” he asked, so intent on her answer he forgot for a moment to hide himself, leaning towards her, his eyes gleaming with fervent truth of the awe she’d evoked in him. He didn’t understand why pedestrian, mundane qualities he’d always derided, on her seemed to hold significance and weight, but the years of watching her had only added to their value. 

“Draco,” she began warily, but his name from her soft lips and the tumult swirling inside him made him lose himself. Later he would think about how she did the same thing to Weasley and Potter, calling them “Ronald” and “Harry” when she meant to rein them in; later he would fear for his family’s life and what they might all have to face; later his and her opposing sides and what his side meant for people like her; later, later, later, but in this moment he simply pressed forward, his hand cupping her face as he kissed her. And for a moment he felt almost like her lips met his. 

When their sixth year came, she didn’t believe Harry when he thought Draco was a Death Eater; his mouth had been on hers, unforceful and chaste. She wouldn’t have let a Death Eater kiss her, and she told herself this over and over, until the words just became noise in her head and a guilty feeling she ignored in her stomach.

He couldn’t afford to be near her anymore. He couldn’t afford the distraction. He had to protect his family. He had to keep them alive. And she’d been distracting him from everything he’d been taught to believe in for three years. He couldn’t have touched her anymore anyway. What he had gotten had been an Orphic miracle he was undeserving of. Now he couldn’t risk polluting her, with her ridiculous high minded ideals, her passionate defence of creatures as small even as house elves; she was entirely of the light, and he’d had darkness put inside his skin. 

He paid no attention in the potions class they shared, his books held to his chest and attention turned somewhere inward. She’d never thought to see him less interested in ingratiating himself or making shirty comments, Slughorn seemingly everything he would’ve prized. He didn’t look up until the liquid luck was mentioned, and then he only went quietly to a work station. She chose the cauldron next to his, and so much as she loved academic achievement, so much as she was challenged by the draught of living death, she wasn’t put out by her difficulties; she barely noticed them for the quiet, singleminded way he went about brewing his potion, her eyes fixed to his unobtrusive, skilful movements. He was different, refined somehow and worn out for it, his face sharper and eyes no longer laughing, even meanly, skin somehow even paler from whatever strain, nearly translucent. 

“ _Draco, Draco,_ ” her voice from that day whispered in his head, not legilimency, but her eyes fixed to him as unwaveringly as they were summoning ghosts. He put it away, didn’t allow his attention to waver, but after class he could feel her waiting for him, lingering over packing her supplies when he tried to outwait her. The classroom emptied quickly, too quickly and his mind was too full and heavy to realise they would be left alone before they nearly were. He could feel her dogging his steps as he slipped out, and he didn’t know if she knew any more than he did why she was following him, or if either of them could figure out where he was leading them. He walked past the room of requirement three times and then grabbed her arm as she stood watching, pulling her inside with him. 

She was breathing like she’d run a mile just from the few steps she’d taken inside the room, her weight and Draco’s slammed against the door, his forehead resting against hers as the hard angles of his body pressed down the length of her own, his hands holding her head, his nose gently brushing hers when they inhaled at the same time. She couldn’t look past his eyes to see what he’d required from the room, if it was even anything or just black nothingness for them to fall into. The dark circles beneath his eyes that swelled his skin looked as though he’d been hit, and somehow she was kissing him because of them, her hands fisted in his uniform shirt as she pulled him tighter into her, and he was holding her back, his hands as desperate as her own. 

He pulled back from her, her arms wound around his shoulders as his hips pushed her into the door, her eyes searching his. “I can’t.” He wanted to. _Don’t stop_. 

“Why?” she asked, and the word was angry, not wounded. 

Because she was going to get hurt. Because he was, in over his head. Because he felt like she’d see through him almost instantly. Because it would hurt again when she did. 

She pushed him off her, Malfoy going without resistance, stumbling back a few lousy steps. “Because I’m a mud—“

“No,” he said, his eyes fixed to her face. He looked away. “I—“ He swallowed as he stared at the ground, looking as if he’d eaten a slug. “I’m—“

“Are you trying to apologise?” she asked, astounded. 

He gave her a sour look. “Now you’re just glorying in it, Granger.” He took a final deep breath. “I’m sorry, for saying that to you. I didn’t— My parents— There’s no excuse.”

Hermione didn’t know what to say. She thought of “thank you”, but she didn’t really feel thankful. He’d apologised, she even half thought he meant it, but words were just words unless you’d done something with the feeling behind them, and he hadn’t. After the way he’d behaved, after the things he’d inherited, it wasn’t enough to earn her forgiveness. “Okay,” she said. 

“Merlin,” he said, and he was looking at her like she was... something, his fingers skating over her cheek as if she would disappear beneath his touch. She’d expected his long, elegant fingers to be soft, his skin as _noble_ as the rest of him, but it was only the tops of his hands that felt like unworn silk, his palms calloused in a way she wouldn’t have thought herself attracted to. She didn’t know why he seemed to like her better for her unforgiving and vengeful nature; most regarded it as a personal failing, especially when it was directed at them.

“Why are you like this?” he whispered, close again, his heavy voice falling into the pit of her stomach in a way that made her skin heat as his dark eyes flickered between hers. She wanted to think he was insulting her, but it was impossible with how he was staring at her, touching her, his cool grey eyes traps for the unwary. She hadn’t thought herself to be among their number. 

Grainger’s brown eyes were warmed pools of honey, little golden flecks in them like glittering sands of time. “Draco,” she said, and he didn’t know if it was a warning or a query, but he kissed her again anyway, murmuring her name against her lips. She made a soft little noise in her throat, like a sleeping puppy might’ve, and his fingers tightened in her hair, his body reacting more violently to that small simple noise than it had to greater displays. He pushed into her against the door and she met him, their bodies surging against each other as if trying to melt together through layers of clothes and skin and muscle. He’d never felt such an urgent need for another person in his life, and the thought made him shudder against her. Some part of him wanted to stop, to fall to his knees before her and cry, explain himself and let her save him, let it be taken out of his hands, but he knew how to be alone, and he couldn’t have said a word. Not to her. 

Draco’s mouth against hers grew clamant and rough, waves of need drowning her as she met his urgency, carried along on the swell of the tide even as she floundered for a moment of rational thought within it. She didn’t understand how his hand could be on her breast, his erection pressing into her hip, and she could still feel as though she was asphyxiating from the lack of him, an ache between her legs raw and unfulfilled, making her whole body tremble. 

“Hermione,” he said, voice deeper than usual as he broke from her mouth to kiss his way down her neck. His tongue scraped over her pulse point before his teeth clamped down into the delicate skin of her neck, biting none too gently, but even that felt good, her thighs pressing together as she practically whimpered for him, her fingers threaded through his platinum hair. 

Grainger’s delicate bookish fingers brushed his belt buckle uncertainly, and Draco felt himself twitch at the graze of her hand. He pulled back to look at her, breathing like a wounded animal as he took in her reddened lips and rumpled clothes. He wanted to fuck her. She was unutterably beautiful in her debauchment. He didn’t know if he could, didn’t know if he was that much of a monster. 

She seemed to see his hesitation, skimming her touch up his arms before winding one hand through the hair at the nape of his neck, the other cupping his cheek as he leaned into her, accepting the comfort of her presence though that too was something he was undeserving of.

“You shouldn’t, Granger,” he whispered. She’d hate herself. That was what gave him pause. All he could see was darkness spreading like clumps of black dirt from the places he’d touched her. 

He avoided her searching gaze, suddenly rather sick to his stomach, and lifted her by her forearms, moving her away from the door before disappearing through it. She heard him kick the wall outside the room before he stalked away. 

**Author's Note:**

> Maybe a second chapter coming later. We’ll see.


End file.
